Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, I am extremely pleased to say, is Lauren Scott-Harris, founder of communications company, Scott Ideas, now the Re: Agency, and the co-founder of EARNT, an initiative – brilliant, by the way – rewarding good deeds with bespoke money can’t buy items and experiences. Having learnt, as she says, the art and science of her industry at PR firm, Freud Communications, Lauren launched her own agency, Scott Ideas, in 2010 – and by the way, I worked out she was 28 at the time and we’ll be talking about that – focussing on mould-breaking, dynamic startups. Lauren saw clearly through early clients, the founders of Headspace, the digital mindfulness platform, that a purposeful business can still be run for profit. Having rebranded in 2022 with longtime business partner, Emma Harding, Lauren brought to life an idea she’d had while watching people queue for limited edition trainers. What if you could only access those trainers if you came to a hosted and verified beach clean-up? What if we convert the energy people have for things they desire into actions the planet needs? EARNT was launched in 2022 with co-founder, Lavina Liyanage. And partner brands include the River Café – my favourite restaurant of all time – Soho House, cult London pub, The Pelican and upcoming collaborations with a global hotel group and a luxury fashion label. It’s fabulous to have you here in this guise, Lauren Scott-Harris, now with me in the Jazz Shapers world because you have been helping me find brilliant people to talk to for I don’t know how long, maybe ten years but no one knew that.
Lauren Scott-Harris
A little longer, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Is it a little longer? We were…
Lauren Scott-Harris
It’s a little longer.
Elliot Moss
…both getting old. You’re not really very old, I’m a lot older but we have, we have, so let’s just do a quick drumroll for we mentioned Andy Puddicombe, Headspace, which was amazing, we mentioned I know Molly and Joel, Desmond & Dempsey.
Lauren Scott-Harris
The lovely Molly and Joel.
Elliot Moss
The lovely Molly and Joel, Desmond & Dempsey, who make incredibly luxurious pyjamas and nightwear and things like that. Charles Finch, who is the Dean & DeLuca man and kind of impresario at large. Who else was there?
Lauren Scott-Harris
Frederic Court.
Elliot Moss
Frederic Court of Felix Capital.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
A venture capital firm behind some really famous brands like Farfetch and the like, and there must, I think there’s someone else as well.
Lauren Scott-Harris
I think there are more, I can’t remember them now.
Elliot Moss
There’s more and the first time I met you, I think I called you a rottweiler.
Lauren Scott-Harris
You did and then we decided you were an Australian Shepherd, you were Shep, you were a sheepdog.
Elliot Moss
This is far too much information, people will go what are they talking about? But here’s the serious thing. All those people have been a brilliant part of the Jazz Shapers journey, which has been over twelve years now and you’ve been behind that stage and you’ve been saying to these clients of yours, come front of stage, you must do your thing, maybe talk about this, maybe talk about that and now here you are front of stage as a founder of a business. Different, huh?
Lauren Scott-Harris
It’s an unusual feeling.
Elliot Moss
What is that feeling though, seriously because it’s, PR people that I meet and comms people and people that promote other people, very rarely want to be in the spotlight.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Yes, I don’t know if I necessarily want to be in the spotlight but talking about EARNT and what it does and why we do it is such an enormous pleasure and I think probably the first time I met you, at some point I mentioned that I had an idea…
Elliot Moss
Yeah, you did.
Lauren Scott-Harris
…called EARNT and that was, I mean, serious procrastination, it took me twelve years or ten years to get it out there but, yeah, it’s so lovely to talk about that I can’t help myself.
Elliot Moss
But going back to that time, I mentioned at the beginning you were 28 when you set up Scott Ideas. A ridiculously young age, you’d been working fresh out of university from whenever that was, 2004, you’d been working for about six years, not a negligible amount of time but not a huge amount of time either. What made you decide that Lauren Scott, Scott-Harris now, was going to do her own thing?
Lauren Scott-Harris
That is a fun question to answer because I don’t think I decided, I think someone else decided and he was an incredible man, who sadly passed away, he’s called Willy Roberts and he ran the most beautiful safari camps in Kenya and we’d known him as a family for a long time and every time we’d see him, I’d say, “I can’t wait to live in Kenya one day” and when I was around 26, he said, “Do you know what, if you say that one more time, I’m going to just push you out the Land Rover, this is so boring. Either move here or not but stop talking about it.” But I didn’t want to live in Nairobi and I didn’t want a desk job, so we said you know, he said, “Well, what can you do?” and I said, “Actually, I can probably do some PR for the camps that you have. Why don’t we give it a try?” and I said, “Could we barter? I’ll do the PR and marketing but please can I live in the bush with you, I really don’t want to live in the middle of the city” and we did it for three months and at the end of that, I was ready to go back to my job and I thought it had been a lovely three month sabbatical and he said, “You’re nuts”, he said, “We’ll be your first clients, we’ll pay you absolutely nothing but we will be your first clients” and in Kenya, they just sort of, you know, people have camps when they’re sort of eighteen or nineteen, it’s just second nature to just do it and get on with it and that was it, it was the really big shove I needed and I went back to New York and I called him and I said, “Actually, alright, I think I’m going to do it” and he said, “Great, well I can I help you, I need some other clients” and he called some friends in Tanzania and that was how it all started but it wasn’t I’d feel entirely my decision but it was a phenomenally good nudge from someone that knew far better than I did.
Elliot Moss
The age thing is, you know, people always say if you’re good enough, you’re old enough, it doesn’t really matter. You had learned your trade, there was a bit of the science and the art. Thinking about, just going back there for a moment though, the juxtaposition of the technical, “I know how to do PR and comms and think about things” versus the reality of actually running your own business; money in, money out, costs, how do you start to grow. What was the learning curve like for the latter? The actual Lauren being the founder.
Lauren Scott-Harris
It was a pretty steep learning curve but truly it was started without any direction. I started because these lovely people in Kenya suggested that I did so and I didn’t think, “Oh, I’ll build an agency” or “I’ll start hiring people”, I just thought I’ll just take a few clients on and so it was just so iterative, which I’m quite grateful for because I think if I’d actually seen the whole mountain, I would have probably shied away from it a little bit and not made the leap but it never felt like a leap, it felt like one more step or one more step.
Elliot Moss
And just thinking, there is one other guest of course who’s relevant in this context that you introduced me to and that’s your dad, Peter Scott, one of the initials in WCRS, which was one of the most successful ad agencies of its era, in its era, you know back in the ‘90s and then onwards. Surely dad, I mean you’d seen him build a business and all the ups and downs of that. That must have been either literally in the room or through osmosis, you were learning.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Absolutely, and he really couldn’t have been more encouraging actually, he was not, he was not a naysayer, he didn’t give warnings, he just, he’s such an entrepreneur and he had that spirit, I think we always had that spirit growing up so, it just felt so natural and so almost unavoidable in a really nice way so, it never felt scary, it probably should have done, you know, I think there’s that wonderful Rudyard Kipling quote, “If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs”, well, maybe you don’t understand the full extent of the problem.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Lauren Scott-Harris
And I definitely did not understand the full extent of the problem.
Elliot Moss
Which is much better. I wish I didn’t understand the extent of most of the problems that I confront every day, I’d be much happier. In terms of the focus that you decided to go down, the route and the positioning, again, in the PR and the communication were very hard to construct a place, much easier if you’re a brand, much harder if you’re an agency. What made you alight in that, I would call it the world of sort of luxury ish but not, not just luxury, special and unusual. I mean, maybe you’ve got a better definition of the kind of the client base you were looking at but…
Lauren Scott-Harris
No, that’s a lovely definition. They were special and unusual and they were dynamic and they were brave and it was also a sort of almost happenstance. At that stage of a business you don’t have huge budgets for PR and marketing. You get a bit lost in an agency so, actually finding a founder that you can work with really closely on both sides, is brilliant. Andy and I used to speak every single day and the joy, having been in a larger agency and working on FMCG brands was that we would just make decisions, you know, and while it was wonderful working with bigger brands earlier in my career, I had an idea that was fed up to someone more senior, that was fed up to someone more senior, that was fed up to the Head of Europe on the brand side and then it came back three weeks later having gone down through, you know, legal or whatever it was and one, we’d lost enthusiasm for it and two, it was a slightly different shaped idea than we’d actually wanted to do and I would just text or call Andy or any of those lovely clients at the beginning and say, “What about this” and they’d go, “Yeah, let’s do it” and that was so liberating and some of them were great, some of them didn’t work, you know, but it wasn’t about that, it was just about that energy of “right, great, let’s try it. Okay, well if that didn’t work, let’s try that” rather than feeling bureaucratic, I think.
Elliot Moss
And finding people that aligned with your, you know, quick ideas, that sense of “I don’t need bureaucracy”, that sense of elegance and style, having an aesthetic appreciation for these kinds of clients. Finding those people, not easy, I imagine.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Well, I was very fortunate that most of them, I think all of them found me and at that point, it was also because I was sitting in this weird spot which was a British and American operator that didn’t have huge overheads so, I could speak, you know I did call it a different language but I could speak American and I could be in London and I could be in New York and I could do both things for them and the difference between me and then an agency was an enormous amount of money so, at the beginning it was this sort of sweet spot of being able to be really hands on and really dynamic with the founders but also, you know, charging a lot less than any of the competitors.
Elliot Moss
Sounds like a good recipe, it’s why it’s done so well. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper today, it’s Lauren Scott-Harris, she’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions which can be found on your podcast platform of choice. Mishcon de Reya’s Ashley Williams and Michael Rose, a senior associate at DRD Partnership, discuss how companies can navigate their AI strategy.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Lauren Scott-Harris, founder of communications company Scott Ideas, now the Re: Agency and the co-founder of EARNT, an initiative rewarding good deeds with bespoke money can’t buy items and experiences. So here we are two years ish into EARNT and it was the idea that you mentioned years and years and years ago. Just in your own words describe the idea.
Lauren Scott-Harris
The idea was born out of essentially, sadly, seeing brands kind of reward and encourage bad behaviour. Sitting on their communication side, we were being really inundated with a lot of requests from influencers, when that all erupted, and in order to kind of get what they wanted from the brand, they just needed a lot of followers. They were at times pretty rude, a little short, this is not meant to be an influencer take down at all but the squeaky wheel was getting the oil and sitting on the front line of that all day, every day and seeing all these brands just sort of dishing out products and products and trips and wonderful things to these people and then opening the paper in the morning or the evening and seeing that nurses are going to foodbanks or you know, all of these things that just felt like we as society were focusing on the wrong things and rewarding the wrong things and I do, you know, I actually genuinely hate getting dressed, if I could wear the same thing every day I would absolutely love that, I find it a complete bore so, someone that gets dressed five times a day, I have a certain amount of respect for but certainly no more than those working on the front line and in an ER and it just seemed like we were just going off in a wrong direction so, the original idea was the one mentioned was, you know, seeing all these people queuing outside of Nike Town and thinking well, what if they didn’t have to wait, what if you could make them go and do a tree planting or a beach clean? They’ll probably quite enjoy it actually, they’ll probably feel quite good about it and it’s constructive, they’ll start talking to one another, Nike will still sell them their shoes, you’re just giving them the access, you’re earning the access to something amazing and that idea would not leave me, I would wake up at night thinking about it, I started talking to a few friends about it and most of them said, “Yeah but where’s the business?”, no one could work out where the cashflow was or what was going on and then a wonderful man, who has now become our chairman, is a man called Seb Bishop, kept saying, well he was like, “Well, think it through, think it through.” So, this was the really funny bit, we started thinking through, okay, let’s say my son Gray, in three years’ time sees some trainers that you can only earn the access to, okay, right. So, it’s going to be a weekend, we’re going to have to do a beach clean-up. Do I really feel like taking him to a beach clean-up at the weekend? Probably not, I’m knackered but I’m going to go, fine. I’ll go and we go and you know, then you’re imagining a bit further and you think and what’s happening. Well, the great British summer has arrived, it’s hammering it down with rain and me and my son are doing a litter pick and he starts finding gross things and asking me what they are, I mean this is a miserable, miserable Saturday, I’m not enjoying it at all. And then Seb kept going and he was like, “Well, what happens next?” and I was like I just, god, I’ve just had a really terrible morning, I’m furious and then, “Oh well then we get our QR codes and then my son and I go and we get our merch and sneakers”, “Cool”, and then someone sees us on the Tube and they go, “Did you do the beach clean-up? Which one did you do?” and we start talking about it and my son and I feel a bit proud about it and then we go to the pub and you know someone asks what we want to drink and we start talking about our shoes and then you ask me how my work is going but I want to tell you about my shoes and it just, suddenly we thought well actually that’s PR and marketing, that’s exactly what I’d been doing my whole life which is trying to get you to talk about the brand I’m working with in a really positive light and if that light can be pride and doing something good for the world, and you’ve done it with your kids or your friends or whatever it is, then surely there’s value in that and not only for the beach getting cleaned but your mental health, for the brand, presumably you know we like to do nice things and put it on social media so everyone knows we’ve done something nice.
Elliot Moss
But also, very simply put, what does the brand do? The brand pays.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
There you go. Well that sounds like a good idea. We’ll be hearing much more about that in a moment. I mean, it’s a genius idea isn’t it, simple. That second time round, before I get into why 2022 in the end, must have been easier, once you’ve gone through the Seb Bishop thing, C, was he CEO of Goop, is that right?
Lauren Scott-Harris
Mm.
Elliot Moss
Yes. Which is Gwyneth Paltrow’s business. Must have been easier for you though as you looked at the, the shape of trying to create an entity and a thing. Was it? Or am I, am I being fanciful and naïve?
Lauren Scott-Harris
I, you may be being a little fanciful, I think you’re giving me too much credit because the first one was truly done on working cashflow, it was a wing and a prayer, there was no plan and actually with EARNT there really needed to be a solid plan but, and I always talk about Headspace when I think about it like this but when we were first talking about Headspace, no one knew what meditation was, we had to see, do people want to know what it is? Will they try it? If they try it, will they pay for it? If they pay for it, will they pay for it again? You know, not just selling trousers and starting at zero on the assumption that people need trousers and it was very much the same with EARNT, we needed to really check like, will consumers respond? Will brands respond? Will causes respond? You know, do they want our help or is it annoying? Are brands interested? Will they pay for it and will people come? So, it was and still is being kind of written as we go with the need for investment but you know, with investment of course you’re trying to define exactly what it is you’re doing and make a really clear proposition and it’s not actually, at the beginning it wasn’t super clear, we just knew there was something in that trainer idea.
Elliot Moss
But in theory, if a trainer brand, a well-known trainer brand says “We’re in, we want to do ten of these and we’re going to give you X million pounds” and then another big brand in another category says you know, well a restaurant is a slightly smaller thing obviously because it may not be a chain but they say, “We’ll do X” then you’ve got to know you’re on to something, I imagine.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Mm, yeah, absolutely and I think the brands that did it at the beginning were quite brave, they were confident and particularly The River Café, they were a luxury brand who were then asking people to come litter picking on the river. We’d spoken to loads of luxury brands before that that sort of, you know, immediately scrunched up their nose and said “but no, wait, we’re selling luxury and you want to talk about…”
Elliot Moss
Yucky stuff.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Yucky stuff.
Elliot Moss
Why did they say yes?
Lauren Scott-Harris
I think they said yes because the storytelling of it was so natural, you know they are looking at the river all day long, it’s their inspiration, it’s their life blood, it’s what you’re going to The River Café, you’re going for the food and you’re going for this amazing view. So they’re seeing this pollution all day long, you know, they’re worrying about it so, to tell their customers, “Listen, we’re redefining VIP actually, VIPs to us are the people that care, they’re not the people that have maybe”, well maybe they are still the people that bought a membership and someone can help get them into restaurants, “these people have come, they’ve given us four hours of their time, they’re welcome whenever they like” and it was such a lovely story and such a clear one for them, it was so tangible, we literally go litter picking right by the little pub down the road called The Crabtree and what we were surprised by, very happily so was, so we, we put out this email with them and we said “does anyone want to come litter picking? You can earn your way into being a River Café VIP and you can get access to this wonderful lunch menu and it’s going to say EARNT on it” and we had over a thousand people try and sign up to this litter pick, which is kind of funny, I mean you can litter pick whenever you want, the litter is the same whether or not you’re doing it with The River Café but then The River Café called us and they said, “Listen, we’ve got some regulars that didn’t get in and they really want to come” and we said, “Well they, they don’t need to come litter picking if they’re regulars, presumably they can get a table whenever they want” and they said, “No, they really want to come, would you please accommodate them” and we were just thrilled and the story, all the little things that were happening when we were doing this, you know there was this mum and son who were trying to get a table for dad’s birthday because they’d never managed to get a table before and there was a guy who ate there every day of his life and he just wanted to meet people that loved the restaurant like he did and there was a guy who wanted to take a girl on a date and she kept saying no and he thought maybe if he got her a table at The River Café it was going to swing it, and all these little conversations going on and it was just magic, it you know, it was like just a little sort of forum on how much all these people loved this restaurant and the lengths they were prepared to go to just even get a table.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, and the thing that strikes me is that in 2022 obviously we’re, we were two years into Covid, you’d been thinking about this idea for a long time, the community thing obviously starts, you know it’s a big part of what you do and what you’ve created but what was the tipping point, who was the equivalent of the nudger that actually got you over the line for EARNT?
Lauren Scott-Harris
So, that was two people, that was Seb, our lovely chairman who I’ve mentioned. I was talking about it a lot more and a lot more frequently and I told him about it and he just called and he said again, exactly like Willy Roberts, he said, “Are you going to do it or are you going to just keep talking about it? Please stop sending me 125 page PowerPoint decks, they’re beautiful but, you know.”
Elliot Moss
They were nice decks, I remember seeing an early one.
Lauren Scott-Harris
You did see an early one.
Elliot Moss
It was a very pretty one.
Lauren Scott-Harris
And they were very lengthy. I loved to discuss it at length. And then the magic was Lavina. So, Lavina and I had worked together when she’d been on the client side, so she was running Onefinestay and we’d worked together years ago and at some point I’d just sent her the deck and said, “Listen, I’m thinking about doing this” and I still wasn’t doing it and what I didn’t even know was, the reason I wasn’t doing it is there were so many, you know, I think I thought it was a hundred piece puzzle and then I opened the box and it was a five thousand piece puzzle and then I realised I didn’t have some of the pieces and she literally, metaphorically turned up with the bag of the missing pieces and she was like…
Elliot Moss
And said, “Here they are.”
Lauren Scott-Harris
Here they are.
Elliot Moss
And that’s, and then I guess the rest is history and of course that was one of, just very briefly, Onefinestay, the founder of Onefinestay…
Lauren Scott-Harris
Greg.
Elliot Moss
…was another one of an earlier Jazz Business Shaper.
Lauren Scott-Harris
That’s true.
Elliot Moss
There you go. Final chat coming up – through you by the way, Lauren, that should be said – final chat coming up with my guest today, that’s Lauren Scott-Harris in case you’ve missed it and we’ve got music from The Meters, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Lauren Scott-Harris is my Business Shaper and we’ve been talking about all sorts of things of lots of use, we’ve been talking about your first business, which is still going obviously isn’t it and then we’re talking about obviously, EARNT. In that bit where you’re a founder and then you step away, just very briefly, how have you managed to remain involved and not annoy the hell out of everybody? Although I don’t know you haven’t annoyed you by the way because I haven’t asked them but are you annoying?
Lauren Scott-Harris
I imagine I am enormously annoying but I try to be conscious of it. I have a wonderful business partner on Re: Agency called Emma Harding, who I’ve worked with more than ten years and as I was really thinking about setting up EARNT, a couple of things happened. One, was we lost most of our clients in Covid.
Elliot Moss
Right.
Lauren Scott-Harris
It was absolutely brutal, we had wonderful travel clients and just the bottom fell out of it, so the, I think the difficulty as an agency founder is always stepping back from that day-to-day client duty but…
Elliot Moss
But you had no choice because they’d gone.
Lauren Scott-Harris
I had no choice, yeah.
Elliot Moss
So that was luck in a way, in a weird sort of perverse way.
Lauren Scott-Harris
In a weird way it was luck and also, I am very conscious of the fact that on both businesses, I have incredible business partners. I take them for granted only in that I can’t imagine not having them, I can’t imagine not having a business partner and all the time though I meet people who are just desperate to find a co-founder of a business partner.
Elliot Moss
And you and Emma talk every day, pretty much?
Lauren Scott-Harris
We talk every day, she’s over in New York.
Elliot Moss
But is it very natural? Is it just not like work when you chat with her even though obviously the things are serious?
Lauren Scott-Harris
I mean, we’ll talk about work and we’ll talk about things that are completely non work related and sometimes I couldn’t tell you what we’ve talked about.
Elliot Moss
What I mean is, is it, but I mean is it normalised because you know each other so well, so it is about work but it, it’s I guess what I’m, the dynamic is really important especially if you’re giving her the keys and you’ve got to feel safe that she understands you know how to unlock all the different doors of the business and all this other stuff and she has a similar view of the world to you but not so similar that it’s Lauren in disguise, right?
Lauren Scott-Harris
Right.
Elliot Moss
So all those things are at play and does that mean that the conversation is just natural rather than well, here’s our agenda and this is what we’re going to go and talk about?
Lauren Scott-Harris
Yeah, absolutely. I’m chairwoman so, I try very hard to only be chairwoman and she is a brilliant CEO so, it is very natural and it does feel, touch wood, it feels easy to talk about it and I think when you’ve worked with someone for that long as well, you’ve had a few bumpy moments, particularly the Covid moment. You’ve had to talk to each other about really bad news, you’ve had to have all of those really difficult bits that you’ve just got to push on through. So when you’ve done a few of those, you know we’re not scared, we know each other’s strengths, we know each other’s weaknesses, she particularly knows my weaknesses, in a really incredible way because then we just have always filled in for each other in the bits.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, and you still do. And then just on the EARNT side, in terms right, I touched on the growing and I know you want to go international and I know that technology is going to play a big part in making this work, what are going to be the one or two things you have to do to unlock what EARNT can be and what’s stopping you doing it?
Lauren Scott-Harris
Ooh, good question. We had to work out, I mean at the beginning, it didn’t occur to me that EARNT wasn’t scalable, I just thought we’d just do loads of events and of course you meet people that are far wiser than you and they just said, “You just can’t, you know, so lumpy, this is not going to be sustainable.” So we had to really study what was going on with volunteering and what, how consumers were behaving and how brands were behaving but I’m very excited to say we have designed a platform, it’ll come out within the next month and what we call that loosely is just always on, it means that you’ll be able to come on at any point, see something that you would like from a brand and when you click through, it’ll tell you all the different ways you can earn it so, you might want Legoland VIP passes for you and your kids because you don’t want to queue for hours and hours and hours and you might be able to go and do four hours of tree planting in Manchester, you might be able to do a litter pick in London but they’ll be different times, different dates and you’ll be joining activities that already taking place with the causes, you might just be checking in to the Felix Project to go and do four hours of kitchen prep.
Elliot Moss
So it’s a dating app, essentially. You’re sort of matching, I mean for good causes and brands and people and you’re essentially giving people like here’s the list of all the stuff, click here, join in.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Exactly that. And the real joy of that is when we work with founder-led businesses and the favourite question we get to ask them, we just say, “What keeps you up at night?” and if they go, “I just, you know, my business is well I make pyjamas but it’s homelessness that just, I cannot, cannot sit with it, it just breaks my heart” and you go, “Great, well let’s say that people that are going to get your discount HAVE to go and work with Shelter” and they’re “My god, can we really do that?” and you go, “Yeah, and we’ll tell you within a month how many hours you have powered off people doing things in your name. Isn’t that lovely?” and it’s, that gets really fun with artist and music and all of that type of stuff.
Elliot Moss
It’s brilliant, I mean it’s sort of one of those, “Oh right, yeah, that’s obvious, isn’t it.” Yes, yes, of course it ISN’T obvious and, is anyone else doing this or is anyone else trying to do this at scale?
Lauren Scott-Harris
So, no one has yet. We always have these triangles in mind of the cause, the brand and the consumer and some people have a line and they’ll link to but no one’s done this triangle as yet. There have been some concerts that you’ve been able to volunteer to get your ticket for but no one has really taken it into product and made all these connections so, hopefully.
Elliot Moss
Fingers crossed.
Lauren Scott-Harris
Yes.
Elliot Moss
A quick thing just before I ask you about your song choice and we’ve ridiculously run out of time super quickly. Do you think you’re better at business now that you’re doing two things, not one?
Lauren Scott-Harris
I think I am better having two completely different businesses and viewing the kind of strengths and weaknesses of the structure of both and it is also nice sometimes to wear a different hat and step out of something for a moment so, yeah, I think probably.
Elliot Moss
It’s been lovely talking to you front of house, not back of house. Well done. She did it, she did it and she’s really relaxed about doing it, it’s brilliant because it’s not an easy thing to do. Just before I let you go, Lauren, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Lauren Scott-Harris
So my song choice is Undecided by Ella Fitzgerald for two reasons. One, I think it’s medically impossible not to dance to this song, it is so good, and then secondly, when I put it on in the kitchen, it makes my son start dancing as well and so it’s dedicated to Gray, my son, who, yeah, generally can’t bear mummy dancing and singing but I do it anyway.
Elliot Moss
Undecided from Ella Fitzgerald, the jaunty song choice of my Business Shaper today, Lauren Scott-Harris. She talked about being pushed over the edge as it were, positively, to just get on with the business idea that she had, twice almost, do it! Just get on with it, stop talking about it. She talked about how her team found her and that comes from real clarity about what you stand for in any marketplace and therefore people will gravitate towards you, and not, and that’s okay too. And then finally she talked about redefining VIP, about the contagious nature of bringing people together as a community, for people who care, to get access to stuff that they wouldn’t have got before. Brilliant stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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